Hammer and Anvil Part 61

"Why did you take the trouble to make a virtue of necessity? Necessity was your adviser, necessity and your confounded pride to boot. You would have set out in quite another way, if you had had any capital to back you."

"But you see I have none, doctor."

"Don't you contradict me, you brainless mammoth! A friend who has capital that he places at our disposal is a capital of our own. I am your friend, I have capital, and I place it at your disposal. Who knows if in this I do not accomplish a work more pleasing to heaven than if I followed my old father's wishes and employed it in a.s.sisting orphan asylums and other such childish undertakings. You are an orphan; so in helping you I follow the words if not the intention of that pious man, and shall be perfectly easy in conscience on that score."

"But I shall not," I replied, laughing.

"Don't laugh, you monster!" cried the doctor. "You don't seem to comprehend that my proposition is perfectly serious. Take my money--there are fifty thousand _thalers_, or thereabouts--go into partners.h.i.+p with the commerzienrath; or better, found a rival establishment, and hoist him out of his saddle: in a few years you will be the first manufacturer and machinist of Germany, and----"

While the doctor thus spoke in feverish excitement the blood had rushed to his head in a really alarming manner. He suddenly checked himself, and it was not until long after that I learned what it was that required such an effort to suppress. It may be that my head, in consequence of my long sitting behind the grog, was by no means perfectly clear; at all events only thus can I explain the obstinacy with which I still contradicted the doctor and maintained that my sense of independence would never allow me to use the capital and a.s.sistance of another as the foundation of my fortune.

"Do you know what you are proclaiming in this?" cried the doctor in his shrillest tones, and wrathfully smiting the table--"that you will remain a beggar, a miserable beggarly fellow, as every one has done who was fool enough to try to drag himself out of the swamp by his own hair? No, no, my good sir; the art is to let others work for you.

Whoever does not understand this, is and remains a beggar."

"What would our best friend have said if he had heard you talk thus?"

"Has he not in life and death proven the truth of it?" crowed the pugnacious doctor. "Do you call it living as a reasonable man, to leave the dearest we have on earth in poverty at our death? And what are the great results of all his long, self-sacrificing, heroic labor for the general good? He fancied, this high-priest of humanity, that his example would suffice to bring about an entire reform of the prison system. And now an old pedant of a king has but to shut his sleepy eyes, and the foundation of his edifice gives way; and as soon as he himself commits the folly of dying, it falls to ruin like a house of cards. If that be not folly I do not know how loud the bells must jingle."

"I know somebody whose cap is quite as well furnished," I said, looking the doctor full in the eyes. "What do you call a man who--as the only son of a rich old father who loves the son and lets him follow his own course, even though he does not comprehend it, with the certain prospect of a considerable inheritance--performs for years the laborious work of a prison-surgeon for the most trivial pay; who, after he has come into the possession of this estate, continues to labor as the physician of the poorest of the poor, and finally, because the weight of his wealth is too burdensome, throws it into the lap of the first man he meets, to die the same irreclaimable beggarly fellow that he has lived?"

"Did I ever pretend to be anything else?" asked my antagonist, not without some mark of confusion. "Oh yes, as if it were only the simplest thing in the world to be a child of prudence. To produce that result requires generations, for shrewdness must be bred in families, like the long legs of race-horses. Take the commerzienrath, who is a cla.s.sic example how shrewdness grows and thrives when it is once properly grafted on a family stock: the man's grandfather was a needleman, who kept a little shop by the harbor-gate in S.; my own grandfather knew him well. He was a disreputable old fellow, who sold nails and needles in his front shop, and lent money on p.a.w.ns in the back room. Then came his son, who was at least a head above his father, and could read and write, and calculate much better than the old man.

He settled in your town and bought shares of s.h.i.+ps, and finally whole s.h.i.+ps, and paved the way for his son, who is the biggest of the lot.

His flouris.h.i.+ng period came in Napoleon's time. Napoleon and the blockade and the smuggling business made a rich man of him. Yes, smuggling--the same smuggling that cost your friend his life. When the Herr Commerzienrath was a smuggler, smuggling was a kind of patriotic work, and the poor devils who risked and lost their lives at it were martyrs of the good cause. G.o.d only knows how many men's lives he has on his conscience. And when afterwards the people who had got into the way of the business would not quit it, and indeed could not, or they would have starved, he was safe enough; he had brought his sheep out of the rain and could laugh in his sleeve. Then came the time of army-contracts, and that again was a good time for him; and thus this leech kept sucking and gorging himself with the blood of his fellow-creatures. Everything that he undertook succeeded; the needleman's grandson and broker's son has become a millionaire, has married a woman of n.o.ble birth, has t.i.tles, orders--all that the heart can desire. Look you, there is a child of prudence, whom I recommend to you as an example."

"That I may lose your and every worthy man's friends.h.i.+p?"

"What good is my friends.h.i.+p to you? My friends.h.i.+p at best is worth but fifty thousand _thalers_. You are quite right not to put yourself out of your way for such a trifle. Marry Hermine Streber--then you will know why you were a beggarly fellow."

"It seems that one falls into this category by having either a great deal of money or none at all," I said, hiding under a loud laugh my embarra.s.sment at his brusque suggestion.

"Certainly," said the doctor, still heated. "Extremes meet, and for this reason I consider your destiny inevitable. The question only is, how to deal with the old man; with the daughter the business is half done, or more than half. Your meeting on the steamer was capital; and now this Richard the Lion-heart in effigy, as long as she has him not in _propria personae_----"

"Doctor," I said, rising, "I think it must be time to say good-night."

"As you please," replied the doctor. "You know with such remarkable exact.i.tude what is good for you that most likely you know this too."

The doctor had also arisen and was now walking up and down the room making frightful faces.

"Doctor," said I, stepping before him.

"Go!" he cried, pa.s.sing round me in a curve.

"I am going," I said, and I went.

But I halted at the door and looked back once more at the singular man, who had thrown himself again into his chair and was watching me angrily through his round spectacles.

"Doctor, you said to me once that you could not well carry more than four gla.s.ses, and this evening you have drunk six. So I will ascribe the unfriendly way in which you dismiss me--for what other reason I cannot imagine--to the fifth and sixth gla.s.s; and now good-by."

I left the room without his making any attempt to detain me, and as I closed the door behind me I heard him burst into a peal of shrill laughter.

"This comes from a man's not keeping within his measure," I said to myself, excusing him.

But as I reached the street below, and the frosty night air blew upon my heated face, I began to perceive that I had not exactly kept within my own measure. My gait as I traversed the empty, badly-lighted streets, now swept by a sharp December wind, was less steady than usual, and strange thoughts pa.s.sed through my head, and I had curious fancies, whose origin could only be traced to the gla.s.ses I had emptied. And once I had to laugh aloud, for I imagined I heard the voice of the short, fat commerzienrath saying quite distinctly: "My dear son, we must mind what we are about or we shall not get home at all, and our Hermine will be alarmed."

CHAPTER III.

As the next day was Sunday, I had leisure to reflect upon the singular behavior of the doctor the evening before; but either the affair was in itself too complicated, or else my memory had suffered from the effects of my strong potations, and I could arrive at no satisfactory conclusion. That the strange man loved me much, after his fas.h.i.+on, I had innumerable proofs, and his anger on the previous evening had been rather that of an elder brother, who sees that the younger, whom he loves, is straying from the right way.

But what upon earth had I done amiss, then? It could not be possible that the doctor could seriously reproach me with my determination to make my own way in the world. He himself had trusted to his own resources very early in life, and with the toughest perseverance carried out his own plans.

a.s.suredly the fact that I had chosen the lot of a workman could be no crime in the eyes of a man whose heart beat so warmly for the poor, and who devoted his whole life to the relief of poverty and misery. The cause of his wrath must lie elsewhere; and after long pondering I came around to the point, that the picture of Paula's, upon which I figured as Richard the Lion-heart, had been the starting-point of our dispute.

Had he taken it amiss that Paula held fast to her model? Did he grudge me the honor of being painted by her? Was he vexed that this picture was not in his possession, but in the hands of a man whom he so hated and despised as the commerzienrath? These were all questions worth considering. I concluded at last that my supposition must be correct, and resolved that this very day, before I called on Paula, I would have a look at the cause of our quarrel.

So about noon I set out for the academy, in the halls of which the great exhibition of paintings had been open now for some weeks. It was my first visit to an exhibition of the sort. My knowledge of pictures up to this time was restricted to a few old discolored saints in the churches of my native town, the engravings and family portraits in the superintendent's house, and the pictures which I had seen growing under Paula's hand. Still, as I had over and over contemplated and studied these few with never-ceasing delight, and had for years been witness of the development of a genuine artist nature, I had, perhaps, if no more, at least no less enthusiasm for beauty than the hundreds that flooded the exhibition-rooms. I cannot describe the feeling with which I, now following the throng, and now separated from it, wandered through the lofty rooms. I had never seen anything like this. I could not have conceived it possible. Were there then so many men who knew how to handle pencils and colors that the walls of this labyrinth of rooms were hung from ceiling to floor with the works of their skill? And was the world so gloriously rich? Was the sky that bent above the sunny bays of the South in truth of so marvellous a blue? Did snow-clad mountains really tower so majestically into the luminous ether? Was the twilight thus mysterious in the pine-fringed gorges of our own mountains? Did such infinite mult.i.tudes of birds indeed hover over the enormous rivers of Africa? Did the palaces of Italian cities rise thus gorgeously above the narrow ca.n.a.ls along which black gondolas were noiselessly gliding? Were there halls in princely mansions whose marble floors thus clearly reflected the luxurious furniture and the forms of the guests? Yes; all these things that I here saw depicted really existed, and much more which my eager fancy added, half in dreaming.

For the more I looked, examined, and admired, the stronger came over me a sense of having seen all this before; yes, seen so clearly that I could tell the artist what he had done well, and where he had fallen far short of the lovely reality. Often I felt really angry with a stupid painter who had seen so dimly, and so poorly represented what little he saw. In a word, in the briefest s.p.a.ce of time I had become a finished connoisseur of the n.o.ble art of the painter, with the solitary drawback that I could in no case have told how the artist should go to work to make his picture better; but perhaps this was a special qualification for the office of critic.

I had probably wandered thus for an hour through the rooms, when stepping into one of the last, which was remarkably brightly lighted by a skylight, I started with sudden and extreme surprise. Looking over the heads of the crowd that filled the hall I seemed to see myself. And it was myself, or at least my counterfeit in Paula's picture, the picture which I had come on purpose to see, and which I looked for so far in vain. A particularly large group was collected before it, looking with eager and admiring eyes at Paula's work, while from many fair lips came the words, "Charming!" "how beautiful!" "what depth of feeling!" It was a queer sensation to me to see myself thus lying upon a bed, in a rich robe of fine linen, and scarcely concealed by a light drapery. The blood suffused my cheeks; I expected every instant to see the crowd turn from the picture to me to compare the copy with the original. But it was probably no easy thing to discover in the tall, healthy young man, in plain citizen's dress, standing back in a window niche, the original of the lion-hearted king, glorified by legend, in a picture on public exhibition. At all events no one made the discovery, and I was left to contemplate the painting at my leisure.

Now I observed for the first time that the picture was of far larger dimensions than the study which I knew. It was, in fact, a new picture, which had been completed since I last had seen Paula. So much the more wonderful, as it seemed to me, was the striking likeness to the original. Here were my curled reddish locks, my rather broad than high forehead, my large blue eyes, which found it so difficult to take an expression of anger. Even the feverish flush which lay upon the sunken cheeks of the royal Richard might at this moment have been seen upon those of the man in the window. In other respects the design remained the same, only the young knight who had the lineaments of Arthur had perhaps withdrawn a little more into the background, so that the broad-shouldered yeoman with the features of Sergeant Sussmilch came better into view. An admirable figure was the Arab physician, _alias_ Doctor Willibrod Snellius, the most singular personage that could be imagined, in the garb of a dervish, and one whom one could not help liking, notwithstanding his ugliness, so that the generous confidence of the king became at once intelligible.

This then was the picture which Paula had painted and Hermine bought.

Was there not here a two-fold reason for a little pride and even vanity? Must not the original be very firmly implanted in the artist's heart when she could make from recollection alone so true a likeness?

Must not the original be somewhat interesting to the purchaser, when she was willing to pay such a price for the copy? These were foolish thoughts, and I can affirm that they vanished as soon as they arose, and the next moment I was heartily ashamed of them. Vexed with myself I aroused myself from my foolish dreaming and turned my gaze once more upon the picture, in front of which the eager crowd of gazers had increased.

Among the new spectators I noticed a lady in a rich and becoming toilette, leaning on the arm of a slender and rather foppishly dressed gentleman. The lady attracted my attention by her elegant figure and the vivacious manner in which she gesticulated with her little hand in its dainty kid glove, and spoke with great animation to her companion, who was evidently more interested by the spectators than by the picture itself. As her back was towards me I could only from time to time catch a glimpse of her face when she glanced over her shoulder at her companion. But the glimpse that I caught affected me powerfully, without my being able to explain the cause: a dark eye-brow, a fleeting glance from the corner of the eye, the contours of a brunette's cheek and of a rounded chin. Yet I could not turn my gaze from the lady. I even made one or two attempts to catch sight of her face, but she always turned it to the other side. The gentleman then seemed to propose that they should go: they were about leaving the room, when in the moment that they crossed the threshold the lady turned her head once more towards the picture, and I came very near uttering an exclamation of surprise? Was it not Constance?

"Did you see the Bellini?" a young officer near me asked an acquaintance who approached and accosted him.

"That lady with the gray-silk dress. Cashmere shawl, and jaunty hat? Is she the Bellini?"

"Yes, indeed. Is she not a charming creature?"

"Superb! And who was the gentleman with her? Baron Sandstrom, of the Swedish emba.s.sy?"

"Do you suppose he would let himself be seen here with the Bellini?

What are you thinking of, baron? It was Lenz, the tenor of the Albert Theatre."

"The man that brought her on the stage?"

"The same. She has a wonderful talent, they say. Well, we shall see what there is in it."

"See? You would not go to the Albert Theatre, baron?"

"Why not, when a Bellini is in question?"